That photo on the cover comes from Marc Yankus, whose subject is New York buildings: “I can feel the brick, I can feel the hardness and the corners of the building ... the structure, the monolith, the sculpture, the abstract.”

In the Art of Memoir No. 2, Vivian Gornick talks about feminism, bad reviews, love versus work, and coming to terms with failure:

I knew I had to stay with it as long as it took to write a sentence I could respect. That’s the hardest thing in the world to do—to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.

And in the Art of Screenwriting No. 5, Michael Haneke reveals the imaginative process behind movies like The White Ribbon and Amour—and why there are no “right” readings of his films:

I would never set out to make a political film. I hope that my films provoke reflection and have an illuminating quality—that, of course, may have a political effect. Still, I despise films that have a political agenda. Their intent is always to manipulate, to convince the viewer of their respective ideologies. Ideologies, however, are artistically uninteresting. I always say that if something can be reduced to one clear concept, it is artistically dead.

A man unzipping his fly is vulnerable to attack. Then the zipper got stuck. An angel flies in the window to unstick it. A drone was monitoring all this In real time And it appears on a monitor on Mars, Though of course with a relay delay. One of the monitors at the Mars base drone station Is carefully considering all your moves for terror output. But not to worry. Forget about about about it.

The body of the man you wereHas disappeared inside the one you wear.

Reminds me of the story of the man who had nipples Where his elbows should be and whose skeleton Was on the outside of his body. The guy walks into a shop on Madison to buy some clothes And buys some and walks out wearing them Wearing them and into the Carlyle bar. One of the waiters, originally from Algeria of all places, Recognizes him and says with the strong accent He has despite many years of living in the United States: Your usual?

A man has disappeared inside his corpse. His corpse has disappeared inside a cause.

Reminds me of the video of Robert Kennedy Announcing to a largely black audience at an outdoor campaign rally At night in Indianapolis That Martin Luther King had been shot And killed and by a white man. Martin Luther King is dead.

Skin color is the name. Skin color is the game. Skin color is to blame for Ferguson, Missouri.

The body of the man you were Has disappeared inside the one you wear.

I wouldn’t want to be a black man in St. Louis County.

A man unzipping his fly is vulnerable to attack. Then the zipper got stuck. An angel flies in the window to unstick it. Here comes light-skinned Billie Holiday, Lady Day, no angel!

A drone was monitoring all this, Which appears on a monitor on Mars, Though of course with a relay delay. One of the monitors at the Mars base drone station Is carefully considering all your moves for terror output. But not to worry. Fuhgeddaboudit.

Reminds me of the story of the man whose smile Shot out flames and whose skin Was on the outside of his body. The guy walks naked into a shop on Madison Avenue to buy some clothes And buys some and walks out on fire wearing them and goes straight Across the street in flames to the Carlyle bar. One of the waiters looks as if he’s having a stroke And raises his hands in Arabic, Palms in, and murmurs a prayer, And brings God a glass of humble water.

You can change From chasing Communists And chasing Jimmy Hoffa, the mobster union president Who however supported civil rights,

And change to blessing and being blessed.

Some victims change from a corpse to a cause. You can change

Reminds me of the video of Robert Kennedy Announcing to a largely black audience at an outdoor campaign rally At night in Indianapolis That Martin Luther King had been shot And killed and by a white man. Martin Luther King is dead.

Frederick Seidel received the 2014 Hadada Prize. This poem will appear in our Winter Issue, available next month.

I just figured there must still be various ways to make art “about” something without making it bad or sentimental. Comics basically seemed a way toward this goal for me … I think cartooning gets at, and re-creates on the page, some sixth sense—of space and of being in a body—in a way no other medium can quite so easily, or at least so naturally.

My nights are a nightmare, quite often, but the nightmares are rich—rich in human behavior, rich in feelings, rich in sensations. I nourish myself by those nights. They nourish me.

And in the Art of Fiction No. 225, the Nobel Prize–winner Herta Müller discusses her early fascination with plants (“They knew how to live and I didn’t”), life under Ceauşescu, and her approach to the sentence:

I’m not hungry for words, but they have a hunger of their own. They want to consume what I have experienced, and I have to make sure that they do that … The language knows where it has to wind up. I know what I want, but the sentence knows how I’ll get there.

And finally, a portfolio of letters between George Plimpton and Terry Southern, circa 1957–58, in which Southern writes of this magazine, “[its] very escutcheon has come to be synonymous (to my mind at least) with aesthetic integrity, tough jaunty know-how, etc.”

At our Spring Revel last month, John Jeremiah Sullivan presented the Hadada Award to Frederick Seidel. Sullivan’s remarks follow, along with three of Seidel’s poems, which were read aloud that night: “Downtown,” read by Zadie Smith; “Frederick Seidel,” read by Martin Amis; and “The Night Sky,” read by Uma Thurman.

As a kind of offsite, ersatz staff member at The Paris Review, I claim the pleasure both of thanking you all for your presence here, and of thanking everyone at the Review—Lorin, and the board, and my colleagues there—for giving me the honor of announcing this award. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word honor in a less glib manner.

When you are in your twenties and living in the city, or any city, or anywhere, and trying to write, there are poets whose work will come to mean something to you beyond pleasure, beyond even whatever we have in mind when we use the word inspiration, and into the arena of survival, into what the poet whose work we are celebrating tonight describes as the “what will save you factor.”

When I was in my twenties and living in New York, the poet who came to mean that for me and a lot of the other younger writers and editors I knew was one named Frederick Seidel, a poet who had come, like another we’d heard about, from St. Louis via Harvard, and from there, via everywhere. Read More »

Massimo Tamburini died last Sunday, at seventy. Tamburini was an Italian motorcycle designer; his work for Ducati, Cagiva, and MV Agusta set the standard for art and style. The journalist Kevin Ash said that Tamburini’s design for the Ducati 916, which debuted in 1994, “moved it forward, personalized, and Ducati-fied it, in particular the blend of sharp edges and sweeping curves, which, like most innovation, broke existing rules.” And this week’s obituary in the Times found many enthusiasts who were unstinting in their praise:

For decades Mr. Tamburini reigned as “the Michelangelo of motorcycling,” as The Sunday Express, the British newspaper, called him in 2010, and his work exerted a pervasive influence on the look of motorcycles in the late 20th century.

“He always gave great élan to the shapes,” Bruno dePrato, the European editor of Cycle World magazine, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “This élan is not aggressiveness, with very edgy shapes and other excesses in styling. His bikes were just shaped by the wind.”

As it happens, Frederick Seidel, whose readers know him as a Ducati aficionado, had paid homage to Tamburini and the Ducati 916 in his poem “Milan,” from the 1998 collection Going Fast. (Curiously enough, Jonathan Galassi also read the final lines of “Milan” in his salute to Seidel at our Spring Revel on Tuesday; read on and you’ll see why.) In memory of Tamburini and his legendary designs, we’ve reprinted the poem here. Read More »

We’re still recovering from Tuesday’s Revel, where some five hundred people gathered to honor Frederick Seidel with the Hadada Award, presented by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Lydia Davis presented Emma Cline with the Plimpton Prize for Fiction; Roz Chast presented the Terry Southern Prize for Humor to Ben Lerner; and Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, and Uma Thurman all read from Seidel’s work. We could say a good time was had by all, but why not let the pictures tell the tale? It was a spectacular evening. You can read accounts of the fun from Page Six, Women’s Wear Daily, and Guest of a Guest. Be sure to take a look at all the photos here, too. See you next year!